Part I: The Groundwork of Rest and Love
Have you ever felt torn between meeting the needs of your heart and meeting the needs of others? As a disciple maker or ministry leader, have you ever felt the need to perform scrape against raw heart wounds or an exhausted spirit? Like you can’t rest or recover because there is so much work to be done?
You’re not alone.
I don’t have some statistic for you that says, “Nine out of ten pastors struggle with performance,” but I do know that rest is one of the only things for which the Bible commands us to strive—or work really hard to attain. Check it out:
So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
(Hebrews 4: 9-11)
There is a rest for God’s people that is much more than a well-earned lazy day on the couch once a week. This rest is a mode of operation, an anti-anxious state of being that trusts God as the well-intentioned King of the Universe—the One working all things for the good of those who love Him. And true rest exists without sacrificing the urgency of the Gospel and the believer’s call to complete the “…good works, which God prepared beforehand” uniquely for each one of us.
Yet even with this definition of rest, we can still be easily overwhelmed by the brokenness that surrounds us. We trick ourselves into a perversion of rest that suppresses our own needs in order to meet those of others, a rest that “leaves it at the foot of the cross,” because “God will take care of it,” or “It’s just a distraction from the mission.” My question to that demon is this: What mission?
Let’s talk about love.
Love is patient, love is kind.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son.
They’ll know you’re my disciples by the way that you love one another.
We understand that love is full of mercy. It's altruistic. It's communal. But what we miss is that before we can love anybody else well, we must love ourselves.
But when the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question to test Him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
(Ephesians 2:10)
Wow. Jesus practically equates loving other people with loving God—the greatest commandment there is. Seen through that lens, the "mission" becomes less about doing some “mighty work” for God and more about loving the one who is in front of us. But what do we really have to offer them if our concept of self is broken? If the only way we know how to value ourselves is for the ministry we’ve accomplished?
In what ways should I love my neighbor? The same way I love myself.
I’d like to submit that in order to make healthy disciples we must have a healthy discipleship culture. And we cannot have a healthy discipleship culture unless disciple-makers love themselves. Otherwise, new believers are baptized into a mission that denigrates self-need in favor of service, who then in turn make new disciples that perpetuate the cycle of works outside of rest with half-formed hearts.
This paints a picture of a Father who cares little about the internal well being of His children and views them more as hired hands to help grow His business. But in the words of my spiritual father, “The world doesn’t need any more half-orphans; it needs wholly formed sons and daughters of God.”
***
It would be easy to misread this article and think of the selfish, self-centered Christians who focus so much on their own process that they completely ignore the needs of those around them: I don’t promote that. But the truth remains that we cannot effectively obey Christ—who commands us to love one another—without first learning how to love ourselves from the place of a love relationship with the Father. Part two will focus on some of the practical ways that loving ourselves well equips us to better love and serve our neighbor—all to the glory of God!
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David Wade writes fiction, nonfiction, and hip hop from his dining room table in Grove City, PA. He lives with his wife, Candise, and studies English Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. For occasional information, follow him on Twitter @davidwadetv
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